Back to school

or

My brain's turned to mush :(

Well, this is the last week before I have to go back to work.  I know this won’t incite much sympathy from people but it always comes as a big shock to the system.  It’ll be worse for me this year because, due to ill health, I’ve only actually worked for 5 weeks in 2012. 

Quite apart from having to get up, early, at a specific time, dress presentably, and commute, I will also be expected to converse and communicate in a comprehensible manner.  Lazing around, pottering, doing things at your own pace and, for a large part, avoiding people, is not good for one’s ability to use language correctly.

I have problems with certain key words that I always have to look up in the dictionary.  And no, using spell-check is not a valid option – spell-checks have no context and you can never be sure which language (e.g. American or English) it is using. And even if it knows you are in Ireland, are you confident that incorrect spellings have not been added to the ‘dictionary’ (I put dictionary in single quotes, because a spell-check installed on a computer is really just a list of words, with no associated meaning).  So it’s a traditional dictionary all the way.

One of the words I have most difficulty with is separate.  I always want to write seperate.  I remember being given back an assignment on Broadband ISDN in college with the word highlighted throughout in red pen.  This was not the norm in a computer science module.  The Sci-day committee once printed t-shirts with the word February spelt wrong and hardly anyone noticed!  But it irked my examiner enough to comment on it.  (For those of you wondering why I didn't use the spellcheck facility, this was written in WordPerfect 5.1 in 1993 and I didn't have the spellcheck add-in.)  And despite that, I’m still unsure and need to refer to the oul’ dictionary.  Other words I have problems with include definitely (definately) and precise (presice).

At least with spellings, with a bit of care and attention, you can hide your flaws.  A more worrying encumbrance is the inability to pronounce or use words correctly.  Again I have my foibles such as environment, government and vocabulary.  I am improving though.  I used to get terribly confused with personal pronouns and would often wander off topic, trying to figure out if I meant to say ‘I’ or ‘You’, ‘we’ or ‘them’.  Normally by the time I’d figured it out, I’d realise that I’d spent the last five minutes muttering to myself while the people I had been conversing with had run away, in a most python-esque manner.  I think I’ve mastered the pronoun problem now, but I’m still never quite sure of the difference between Cole Porter and Phil Coulter, George Hook or George Lee, Kevin Barry or Barry Kent, to name but a few.  I just try to steer the conversation away from these popular topics.  (Do these count as malapropisms?)

But, with the ubiquitousness of American English through its dominance of the world wide web, and the popularity of text-speak, it is easy to get confused.  Words one could spell with ease 15 years ago, can leave one muttering to oneself again and making basic errors with “your” and “you’re” for example.  When do you use ‘s’ and when do you use ‘z’?  Organise or organize?  And, even if you look a word up on-line in a dictionary, can you be sure it is both accurate and reliable?

I am quite pleased to have come across one particular on-line dictionary – Wictionary.  As with Wikipedia, it is editable by the general public.  While this may cause one to question its credibility, it is worth noting that Wikipedia has been shown to be at least as reliable as Encycleopedia Brittanica.  Admittedly this is quite an old study (2005), and I don’t feel inclined to investigate it further, but I’ll include it because it suits my purpose.   

Anyway, I won’t be turning to Wictionary to check my spellings.  For that, I’ll still be using the traditional hard-copy dictionary, but I really like it because it validates some of my favourite and most used words.  Yes, yoke (11th noun definition) is a valid term for a thingamajig (careful with the spelling now - I've always written thingymajig!) or a whatsit (plural, whatsits).  And the oul’ I used earlier is an alternative form of ould which can either mean old, aged, long-established or be used as a term of denigration.  You choose!  Interestingly, while both yoke and ould are identified as Irish, thingamajig and whatsit seem to be international.   Who’d have thunk it?  (Yes, thunk is valid too, as a past participle of think!)